Milestone Approaches in Bid to Restore the Great Plains

By JIM ROBBINS

Published: November 17, 2005

''Got to feed my buffies,'' Bill Willcutt, a black silk kerchief tied around his neck, says as he jockeys a pickup truck into place behind a large, round bale of hay.

Two metal arms swing down and pick up the roll and drop it in front of 16 bison in a pen made of hay bales.

Mr. Willcutt is no ordinary rancher. He manages more than 31,000 acres here in the heart of Phillips County, one of the most remote counties in the continental United States.

He has been entrusted with the bison, which are seed stock for the start of a restoration project by the American Prairie Foundation, which owns 11,000 acres and leases 20,000 more.

On Nov. 17, the bison will be turned out of their pen onto the dun-colored prairie in the middle of their ancestral home.

The foundation's project is one of several major independent efforts under way across the West intended to re-create North America's ancient prairie. The players include the Nature Conservancy, the World Wildlife Fund and Ted Turner, the media mogul, who owns a large bison herd.

Several factors have contributed to a movement to restore the Great Plains, an ecological phenomenon called mixed-grass prairie that stretches from southern Canada to the Sandhills of Nebraska.

''It has the most breadth, depth and diversity of fauna than anywhere on the High Plains,'' said Sean Gerrity, the executive director of the American Prairie Foundation.

Birds are especially diverse, with rare grassland species like the greater sage grouse and Sprague's tippet found in abundance.

The notion of restoring the prairie to the days of the early 19th century -- with large herds of free-roaming bison and other recovered species and an ecotourism economy based on the viewing and hunting of wildlife -- was broached in 1987 by two professors, Frank Popper at Rutgers, and his wife, Deborah Popper, who teaches at the City University of New York.

A paper the couple wrote, ''The Great Plains: From Dust to Dust,'' described the region from the Canadian border to Texas as the United States's steppe. Their intent was to encourage new ways of thinking about the prairie beyond traditional agriculture, but many prairie residents believed that the Poppers were advocating the forcible depopulation of the area.

The Poppers, who were denounced and threatened, said they were surprised by the intensity of the response.

But the times have changed. The population has been falling in north-central Montana, which was settled by homesteaders lured west by the railroad and the promise of free land.

As small farms fail and are absorbed by larger ones, people blow away like tumbleweeds.

November is a pallet of browns and gray in Phillips County, one of the least populated areas in the United States. In 1898, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner declared that a place was no longer part of the frontier if it had more than two people per square mile.

Phillips County has less than one person per square mile, and half of them live in Malta, population about 2,000.

At times beautiful, the country is also harsh. The foundation's ranch is an hour's drive from Malta, which is about 35 miles from the Canadian border, and if it rains, the roads become an impassable muddy gumbo.

The population of Phillips County peaked at 9,300, in 1920, and has fallen in every census since. It was 4,600 in 2000, and many who remain are elderly. The pattern is similar across much of the Great Plains, where federal subsidies provide life support for the agricultural economy.

An organization that has criticized the subsidies, the Environmental Working Group, said the United States Department of Agriculture has reported subsidies of $110 million paid to about 1,000 farmers and ranchers in Phillips County over the past 10 years.

But instead of attacking the idea of restoring the prairie, some former opponents of the concept, like J. Michael Hayden, the former Kansas governor who is now the state's secretary of wildlife and parks, are saying it may have merit as an alternative to the declining agricultural economy.

''I had to eat crow,'' Mr. Hayden said. ''They made a bunch of predictions about out-migration from the Great Plains, and they came true.''

Still, there are opponents.

''I'm not thrilled,'' said Kenny Blunt, a Malta real estate agent and rancher. ''When you remove cattle and put on bison not a whole lot of anything is going to happen. Bison won't come close to creating the economic engine cattle create.''

Many ranchers worry that the bison will escape and knock down their fences or damage their pastures.

But a lack of organized opposition indicates a change in attitude, especially if tourism were to take root.

''It's all part of a recreation economy,'' said Marty Lundstrom, assistant manager of Northern Agrifeeds, which supplied nine miles of electric fence for the American Prairie Foundation's ranch.

''They stay in the hotels, eat at the restaurants, shop at the clothing stores,'' Mr. Lundstrom said of tourists. ''Anything that brings people to Phillips County is good for the economy. We just don't know how much it's going to help.''

The American Prairie Foundation paid from $110 an acre for native prairie to $600 for irrigated hay meadows. Its ranch is just a sliver of the proposed restoration project.

With the 1.1-million-acre Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge, the 700,000-acre Missouri River Breaks National Monument and thousands of acres of land managed by the federal government, the foundation is hoping to create a refuge larger than Yellowstone National Park.

The organization has been careful in presenting its proposal. It has held meetings to explain its plans and does business in Malta when it can. It has restored a one-room log schoolhouse with a sod roof and brought former students back for a reunion.

The ranch, whose only full-time occupant is Mr. Willcutt, has brought new people to this isolated region. Mr. Gerrity, the foundation's executive director, said about 200 people had already come to watch birds and work at the ranch, which will be open to the public.

Last year, 50 people attended a concert by the Boston Muir String Quartet of the Boston University School of Music that was held in a large tent on the ranch, a first, it is safe to say, for Phillips County.

But Curtis Starr, the editor of The Philips County News, a weekly with a circulation of 2,600, said the community had doubts.

''There's still a great deal of skepticism,'' Mr. Starr said. ''We take with a grain of salt the fact that buffalo are the future and are going to save our county.''

Photos: Sixteen bison will be released today at a Montana ranch owned by the American Prairie Foundation, which is trying to return the Great Plains to its early 19th-century state. Bill Willcutt, left, manages the ranch. (Photographs by Anne Sherwood for The New York Times)

Correction: November 18, 2005, Friday
An article yesterday about a project to restore the Great Plains misstated the name of a bird found in abundance there. It is the Sprague's pipit, not Sprague's tippet.